Arctic Fox web browser for 10.6 (32 & 64-bit)

[z970]

@xeno74

Chris, that's wonderful news. Thanks to this project and its great browser, it is now fully viable to run 12.04 (and the last working version of Unity, no less) if you need to, so I extend massive congratulations to you and wicknix. The fact that Arctic Fox is much faster than TenFourFox, has a much larger breadth of compatibility, and can stream video with far less hiccups is no small feat, and is just icing on the cake.

So indeed, a tremendous thank you to both of you, which is something I believe most of the community can echo.

Forgive me if this has already been answered somewhere, but how do you install it? Are you supposed to run the binary in the arcticfox folder every time you use it?

Thank you.

 

[wicknix]

It's meant to be self contained and semi portable. However You can put it anywhere and create a desktop/menu shortcut. I put mine in /opt. So I have /opt/arcticfox. Add a arcticfox.desktop file to /usr/share/applications to have it appear in the menu. Some people create a /bin folder in their home directory. Either way an arcticfox.desktop file is needed for menu entry / desktop icon. (Copy firefox.desktop and edit to reflect arcticfox path and icon).

Cheers

 

[swamprock]

I added the Fienix repo to my Debian sid install and now get updates to Arctic Fox when they're available. Cool stuff

 

[z970]

It's meant to be self contained and semi portable. However You can put it anywhere and create a desktop/menu shortcut. I put mine in /opt. So I have /opt/arcticfox. Add a arcticfox.desktop file to /usr/share/applications to have it appear in the menu. Some people create a /bin folder in their home directory. Either way an arcticfox.desktop file is needed for menu entry / desktop icon. (Copy firefox.desktop and edit to reflect arcticfox path and icon).

Cheers

I see. With this in mind, I made a kind of guided "installer" for personal use to simplify things. It works great, and as a result, my life is easier. It assumes the freshly downloaded arcticfox archive is in your Downloads directory, and that you have Firefox ESR installed, so if that isn't the case, just take out the "-esr" in the .desktop file. It will also only generate the menu entry in English.

PS: This "installer" comes with no warranty whatsoever.

Install Arctic Fox: (depends: firefox/firefox-esr preinstalled)

1. cd ~/Downloads/ && sudo tar xvjf *.bz2 && sudo mv -f ~/Downloads/arcticfox/ /usr/lib/ && sudo nano /usr/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop

2. Delete everything on screen.

3. Copy/Paste into Terminal:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Arctic Fox
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
GenericName=Web Browser
X-GNOME-FullName=Arctic Fox
Exec=/usr/lib/arcticfox/arcticfox %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/lib/arcticfox/browser/icons/mozicon128.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupWMClass=arcticfox
StartupNotify=true

4. Confirm functionality.

To Update Arctic Fox: (depends: arcticfox preinstalled)

1. cd ~/Downloads/ && sudo tar xvjf *.bz2 && sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/arcticfox/ && sudo mv -f ~/Downloads/arcticfox/ /usr/lib/

2. Confirm functionality.

If you have a Debian-based system, all you would presumably need to run to remove it is:

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/arcticfox/ /usr/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop && sudo apt autoremove firefox-esr

Afterwards, you should be able to start from scratch with just normally reinstalling Firefox ESR, or whatever it may be.
[doublepost=1549413889][/doublepost]Speaking of Firefox ESR, I found the last version of PowerPC Firefox that does not happen to be a buggy mess.

https://snapshot.debian.org/archive...refox-esr/firefox-esr_45.9.0esr-1_powerpc.deb

Has anyone tried 52.9 from the PowerProgress repo? The official version only ever went up to 52.8, so maybe the PP guys fixed something.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Hi,

i have installed Ubuntu 16.04 simultaneously to my MacOS 10.5.8 (System is an iMac G4)

Im very happy that finally a current browser is available for Ubuntu.

Now the "problem":

If a new version is available, i go to https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox/wiki/Downloads, download the new version and install it manually. This is very time consuming.

Is there a way to install in over apt-get or something like that? If yes, please a step by step instuction.

 

[wicknix]

@z970mp Cool. Whatever works for you. I did try the 52.9 build on my G5. Sadly it's very slow. Takes what feels like 2 minutes to launch and pegs cpu for quite awhile even after the window shows (probably still loading libxul in the background). I uninstalled it shortly after that.

@TzunamiOSX Currently there is not. Casey (the creator of Fienix Linux) has repacked and added arctic fox to Fienix's repository though. If anybody wants to repack them as .deb, or .rpm or whatever, i will gladly link to our download page, but being that AF runs on more than just debian/ubuntu this is the easiest way to distribute.

Cheers

 

[z970]

Hi,

i have installed Ubuntu 16.04 simultaneously to my MacOS 10.5.8 (System is an iMac G4)

Im very happy that finally a current browser is available for Ubuntu.

Now the "problem":

If a new version is available, i go to https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox/wiki/Downloads, download the new version and install it manually. This is very time consuming.

Is there a way to install in over apt-get or something like that? If yes, please a step by step instuction.

Personally, I would just bookmark https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox/wiki/Downloads, and once the .bz2 file is downloaded, open a terminal in your Downloads directory (or just enter "cd ~/Downloads"), and run:

sudo tar xvjf *.bz2 && sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/arcticfox/ && sudo mv -f ~/Downloads/arcticfox/ /usr/lib/

Or...

You could do what swamprock did and add the Fienix repository into your sources.list file, which would allow you to install it over apt, but you'd have to consult him as I don't know how he secured the public key.
[doublepost=1549429038][/doublepost]

@z970mp Cool. Whatever works for you. I did try the 52.9 build on my G5. Sadly it's very slow. Takes what feels like 2 minutes to launch and pegs cpu for quite awhile even after the window shows (probably still loading libxul in the background). I uninstalled it shortly after that.

Then that means they did not fix anything from the official 52.8 build.

That's a shame.

Who cares, we've got Arctic Fox. This lightweight and optimized community-upheld browsing solution is the greatest.

 

[wicknix]

Who cares, we've got Arctic Fox. This lightweight and optimized community-upheld browsing solution is the greatest.

Hah! Thanks. I'm not so sure it's the greatest, as it has it's own set of shortcomings, but for the most part it works quite well.

Cheers

 

[swamprock]

You could do what swamprock did and add the Fienix repository into your sources.list file, which would allow you to install it over apt, but you'd have to consult him as I don't know how he secured the public key.

I edited my sources.list and added the repo:

deb http://75.134.17.247/repos/apt/debian/ sid main
deb http://75.134.17.247/repos/apt/debian/ fienix main

The public key is found at http://75.134.17.247/repos/apt/conf/public.gpg.key

sudo wget -O - http://75.134.17.247/repos/apt/conf/public.gpg.key|apt-key add -

Alternately, you can add it with:

sudo apt-key adv--keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 23D50DD8548D45C5

I think I found the above key using apt-key list, AFTER adding the repo and doing an apt-get update. It may have changed/been updated since then.

 

[xeno74]

@xeno74

Chris, that's wonderful news. Thanks to this project and its great browser, it is now fully viable to run 12.04 (and the last working version of Unity, no less) if you need to, so I extend massive congratulations to you and wicknix.

Thanks for your kind words.

@ All
Arctic Fox 27.9.15 on the A-EON Live Remix DVD (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS):

 

[dbdjre0143]

Thanks so much for the Ubuntu 12.04 build @xeno74! Just installed this on my 1GHz iBook G4 running Debian 8 and it works fabulously! WAY better than any other browser I've used on this machine/OS combination (posting from it now actually!)

Also question, after re-reading that post, I'm wondering is that build a non-altivec build? If so, what is the best build to run on a G4 with Debian 8. I tried the build from the download page for Debian 9, but it said my GLIBCXX was too old, and it seems that's the newest version for Jessie (though I'm not 100% certain about that)

 

[z970]

Thanks so much for the Ubuntu 12.04 build @xeno74! Just installed this on my 1GHz iBook G4 running Debian 8 and it works fabulously! WAY better than any other browser I've used on this machine/OS combination (posting from it now actually!)

I could not agree more, and same here. It's so fast, and when you give it the TFF tweaks, you could very well be running a modern computer.

One thing I never understood is that, although I'm sure Dr. Kaiser put a tremendous amount of effort into the development of his great browser, something that was so optimized and specialized to the bone with so much Altivec never made sense to be so sluggish.

Perhaps it was the fault of OS X? Firefox on its own was never too slow, so I can't figure out why something that should be faster ended up slower.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Just installed this on my 1GHz iBook G4 running Debian 8 and it works fabulously!

Can you tell me if it works with Google Street View? On my Mac Pro both 32 and 64 bits freeze with it. Sadly, Arctic Fox seems to be causing hard kernel panics too (random, not site specific) so it's back to Waterfox for now.

 

[z970]

Can you tell me if it works with Google Street View? On my Mac Pro both 32 and 64 bits freeze with it. Sadly, Arctic Fox seems to be causing hard kernel panics too (random, not site specific) so it's back to Waterfox for now.

For me, it freezes on the Google Maps site. But, running on Linux, there are no kernel panics and if it should freeze, xkill can be very useful to dispatch it and get right back to what you were doing. You can map it to a key combination, and once you press that combination, you can graphically pick which window (process) you want to quit.

I'd recommend OpenStreetMap as an alternative. There is no street view (that I'm aware of), but it's much faster, and it's community-maintained.

 

[Dronecatcher]

For me, it freezes on the Google Maps site. But, running on Linux, there are no kernel panics and if it should freeze, xkill can be very useful to dispatch it and get right back to what you were doing.

When it did freeze, cmd W was enough to release it - the kernal panics are another matter - not used to seeing them at all!

 

[wicknix]

@dbdjre0143 That's more than likely a non altivec build as the amigaones don't have support for it if i recall correctly. Having said that, i've run both non altivec and altivec enabled builds on my g4 and g5 and honestly i can't tell the difference in performance. If there is any it's very minor.

@Dronecatcher Does your mac pro run 10.7 or above? If so give my NewMoon branded Pale Moon 28 build a spin.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCq_NXXT3WtFqASUWlX0pxyrMgu3ppZ-/view?usp=sharing

Cheers

 

[philgxxd]

Any news on running it on 10.5 Intel ?

 

[Dronecatcher]

@Dronecatcher Does your mac pro run 10.7 or above? If so give my NewMoon branded Pale Moon 28 build a spin.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCq_NXXT3WtFqASUWlX0pxyrMgu3ppZ-/view?usp=sharing

Yes, 10.7.5 - I'll give NewMoon a spin

What are the differences?

 

[vddrnnr]

Hi wicknix,

Is your new moon 32bit also? ( I have 10.7.5 running on a CoreDUO )

Best regards,
voidRunner

 

[wicknix]

@Dronecatcher PM28 is a much newer code base, and is more web compliant.

@vddrnnr It is not. They removed support for 32-bit mac in v28. That's one of the main reasons I forked v27 so it could still support 10.6.

@philgxxd Not yet. It's still on the to do list along with ppc 10.5.

Cheers

 

[kencu]

any insights on getting Github to work? Arctic Fox, TenFourFox Intel on 10.5/10.6/10.7/10.8, and all other browsers only partially work on Github.

The only 10.6 to 10.8 browser I have that fully works on all sites is gtk's epiphany, using the current webkit2-gtk. And although that indeed works, it is not fully stable, and has some gtk timeout issues that I am not expert in fixing.

I wonder if we might get something more solidly wrapped around webkit2-gtk -- the benefit of that would be that it is actively maintained by a huge team of developers, and likely to work for a very long time.

 

[wicknix]

@kencu The issue with github and a few other sites (userstyles.org is one) comes down to the javascript engine. What's needed is to, if possible, implement the engine from (minimum) FF52 where both sites work properly. However, if you want a current and properly working github on 10.7 or up, try Pale Moon 28 or Basilisk. While neither are officially supported on Mac yet, i have built unofficial branded builds and have download links to them on their forum. ( https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41&sid=8dbac9aec710a065f64aa91c48a847fd ) I really need to get back to helping get Mac officially supported by those browsers, but AF got way more popular than Riccardo and i anticipated (huge ppc linux interest) that has kept me away from diving back in to it. Interesting to hear about webkit2-gtk however. Might have a look at that in the future.

Cheers

 

[snowy moon]

Hmm, I just had problems while importing bookmarks from Pale Moon (27.9.4) into Arctic Fox (27.9.15), both running on 10.6 intel 64bit. I exported json (and html) via PM’s "organize bookmarks". During json restore (and html import) Arctic Fox became unresponsive with spinning beachball, unfortunately no telling console output.

I ended up, implanting the sqlite files from old profile to the new one, which works out well.

 

[xeno74]

I know, I am crazy! (see screenshot)

 

[B S Magnet]

When it did freeze, cmd W was enough to release it - the kernal panics are another matter - not used to seeing them at all!

I discovered my rock-solid 2011 MBP on 10.6.8 also went to hard kernel panic shortly after installing and launching this version of Arctic Fox (also the first time I've even run Arctic Fox). I cannot even remember the last time I saw that system throw a hard kernel panic like this. It's probably been years.